The feature-packed MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Edition 9 includes just about everything you need to manage your PC's partitions, but a few niggles leave room for improvement in a future update.

Windows's built-in disk management utility does an adequate job of letting you manage your PC's partitions, but if you want to perform a deeper dive into your PC's hard drive (or drives!), check out MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Edition ($39, or $59 for free lifetime upgrades). This lightweight utility packs a slew of features that should appeal to PC tinkerers, including partition expansion, surface tests, and hard drive format conversions, but a few small complaints may give potential users pause in this otherwise highly regarded application. A free version is also available, but it lacks batch operations and other features found in the paid version.

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Compatibility and FeaturesPartition Wizard Pro, compatible with Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10-powered machines, gives you at-a-glance information about your computer's hard drives, though the blue user interface grates on the eyes during long periods of use. Partition Wizard Pro's Server 2012 R2 compatibility should not be overlooked. MiniTool lets you use the $39 utility on up to three servers; EaseUs Partition Manager, a competing utility, asks that you cough up $159 for its Server edition. Partition Wizard Pro will leave extra money in your pocket in that regard.

The utility's layout, which is similar to Windows Explorer, lets you see the hard drives' total storage capacities, file systems, file types, statuses, and more. If you don't know what some, or any, of those terms mean, you'll need to consult your search engine of choice for definitions, because Partition Wizard Pro doesn't supply any. That's not to say that Partition Wizard Pro doesn't supply definitions at all—you can find many in the Help section—but those particular ones are not included.

Partition Wizard Pro is obviously intended for people who like digging into their computers' guts—there are numerous hard drive formatting, relettering, and data-transfer options. The interface's left column contains two sections: Wizards and Operations. The Wizards sections contains easy-to-use guides that let you migrate your computer's operating system to another drive, copy a partition, copy an entire disk, or recover a deleted partition. Operations has more than five times as many options, including Change Drive Letter, Hide Partition, and Wipe Disk. Certainly, I could execute some of these features in other programs like EaseUS, but I found Partition Wizard Pro's interface slightly easier to navigate.

Hard Drive and Data ManagementPartition Wizard Pro has a lot of options, so I used the utility to perform a handful of the more common hard drive management tasks. I quickly noticed that Partition Wizard Pro lets users queue commands, which I found incredibly handy. It freed me from being parked at my desk as it created partitions, merged partitions, deleted partitions, and then wiped an external hard drive. I also used Partition Wizard Pro to transfer 115 GB of data from my primary hard drive to a secondary drive—the process took just over an hour.

I was happy to discover that Partition Wizard Pro is compatible with removable storage; when I inserted a SD card into my PC, the utility instantly read and recognized the 32 GB drive. Finally, I deleted photos and videos from the SD card using the Wipe function, which let me select one of five different data deletion methods that overwrote the files with zeroes and ones to prevent forensic recovery.

Partition PartyMiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Edition 9 makes creating and managing partitions a simple affair, thanks to its intuitive layout and deep feature set. Even better, network engineers can use this inexpensive utility in lieu of more expensive ones like EaseUS. Partition Wizard Pro isn't perfect, but it's a highly effective tool that you should download.

MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Edition 9

Bottom Line: The feature-packed MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Edition 9 includes just about everything you need to manage your PC's partitions, but a few niggles leave room for improvement in a future update.

For more than a decade, Jeffrey L. Wilson has penned gadget- and video game-related nerd-copy for a variety of publications, including 1UP, 2D-X, The Cask, Laptop, LifeStyler, Parenting, Sync, Wise Bread, and WWE. He now brings his knowledge and skillset to PCMag as Senior Analyst.
When he isn't staring at a monitor (or two) and churning out Web hosting, music, utilities, and video game copy, Jeffrey mentors, practices Jeet Kune Do, blogs, podcasts, and speaks at the occasional con. He also collects vinyl and greatly enjoys...
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